Second Lebanon War:
Photo Manipulation
and Fraud During the Conflict

by David Krusch
(Updated January 2007)

Reuters’ photographer
Adnan Hajj doctored the photo on the
left using photo editing software
to show more intense smoke and
destruction in Beirut. Reuters
admitted to the manipulation and
apologized, fired Hajj, and removed
the doctored photo from its archives.
The original photo appears on the
right.

Adnan Hajj, a Lebanese freelance photographer, was recently found to have doctored a photograph he took of Beirut after an Israeli airstrike on the city. After the photo ran on the Reuters news service on Saturday, August 5, Internet bloggers immediately noticed it had been manipulated with photo editing software, and created an uproar on their blogs. By Sunday, Hajj had been fired by Reuters, and his past work had been investigated for other instances of doctoring.

The blog LittleGreenFootballs.com
first broke the story of the doctored photo after Charles
Johnson, who runs the blog, posted the photo on the
site. Johnson wrote, “This Reuters photograph shows blatant evidence of manipulation. Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop ‘clone’ tool to add more smoke to the image.”

Reuters
issued a picture kill and apologized for
the doctored photo by Adnan Hajj.

Reuters issued a picture kill and apologized for the doctored photo by Adnan Hajj
On July 27, 2006, the New York Times web site ran a photo essay by Tyler Hicks depicting a rescue effort in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese city of Tyre. In this instance, the photos were not artifically manipulated, but were found to be fraudulent, and that a man that was said to have been killed in an airstrike was actually posing for camera.

A blogger on the The Gateway Pundit
blog, after noticing that the final photo in the photo
essay was a fraud, wrote “From the New
York Times photo essay by Tyler Hicks on July 27, 2006 comes this unbelievable fraud! Dead Guy with no dust shows up with hat in photo no. 2 pointing out something to the photographer.”

After a series of complaints, the New York Times issued a correction for the photo. The
correction read: “A picture caption with an audio slide show on July 27 about an Israeli attack on a building in Tyre, Lebanon, imprecisely described the situation in the picture. The man pictured, who had been seen in previous images appearing to assist with the rescue effort, was injured during that rescue effort, not during the initial attack, and was not killed.”

The correct description was this one,
which appeared with that picture in the printed edition
of The Times: “After an Israeli airstrike destroyed a building in Tyre, Lebanon, yesterday, one man helped another who had fallen and was hurt.”

In one
of the opening pictures of the New
York Times photo essay on July
27, the man is the foreground wearing
the green hat is pointing out something
to the photographer.

In the
next slide, the same man is seen
scrambling over rubble.

The same
man is again seen in the next slide
running over the debris.

For the
final picture in the photo essay,
the Times wrote, “The
mayor of Tyre said that in the worst
hit areas, bodies were still buried
under the rubble, and he appealed
to the Israelis to allow government
authorities time to pull them out.” However,
this is the same man who had, moments
earlier, been running over the
rubble. Notice the green hat between
his body and arm.

Another example of misleading
photography came from the cover of the July 31, 2006
edition of the U.S. News and World Report.
The cover of the magazine had large photo of an armed
man standing in front of a burning fire supposedly
caused by Israeli airstrikes. The caption on the cover
read, “A
Hezbollah fighter near Beirut.” The photo
implies that this fighter is standing near the scene
of destruction in Beirut caused by Israeli artillery
fire.

Another photo of this exact same scene
also appeared on page 45 of the recent edition of Time magazine,
with the caption: “The
wreckage of a downed Israeli jet that was targeting
Hizballah trucks billows smoke behind a Hizballah
gunman in Kfar Chima, near Beirut. Jet fuel set the
surrounding area ablaze.”

Photo
from the cover of the July 31, 2006
edition of U.S. News and World
Report depicting a Hizbullah
operative supposedly standing near
the scene of destruction near Beirut
caused by Israeli artillery fire.

A
similar photo with the same man
appeared in a recent edition of Time with
the caption: “The wreckage
of a downed Israeli jet that was
targeting Hizballah trucks billows
smoke behind a Hizballah gunman
in Kfar Chima, near Beirut. Jet
fuel set the surrounding area ablaze.”

Another
photo of the Hizbullah operative
from the U.S. News and World
Report taken by discredited
photographer Adnan Hajj.

Time subsequently
issued an apology for it’s misleading
caption. The photographer who took the pictures,
Bruno Stevens, later explained that the caption
he submitted with his photo was changed by
the magazine editors. Stevens returned to
the site and collected additional evidence
that led him to update his caption to make
it even clearer that Israel had attacked
a legitimate target and that the fire had
not been a result of a downed plane. He wrote,
“Kfar Chima, near Beirute, July 17,
2006. The Israeli
Air Force bombed a group of Hizbullah chartered
trucks parked on back of large Lebanese Army
barracks, at least one of these trucks
contained a medium range ground to ground
missile launcher, at least one missile was
hit, misfiring high into the sky before falling
down and starting a huge fire in the barracks
parking lot.”

What made the misuse of
the photos by the two publications even more
egregious was the fact that they chose not
to publish another Stevens photo that showed
a medium-range ground-to-ground missile launcher
hidden in a civilian truck on a Lebanese
army base. “This
is a very important piece of evidence showing
probable collusion between Hizbullah and
the Lebanese Army,” noted Stevens. “There
is little doubt that the Lebanese Army was
aware of the presence of at least one missile
launcher and at least one large missile on
their parking lot.....There were 6 to 8 large
articulated trucks parked there, making it
a very legitimate target for the Israeli
Air Force, quite far away from civilian
houses.”

These photographs are only a small sampling
of doctored or staged pictures
that have been appearing in newspapers and
magazines worldwide in an attempt to show “Israeli
cruelty” during its fight against Hizbullah.

Due
to lack of oversight or fact checking by
the editors of these publications, many of
these photos have made it onto the front
page of major newspapers and magazine such
as the Washington Post,
the The
New York Times and Time. Even
when these publications issue corrections
for inaccurate captions or apologies for
a fraudulent photograph, the public relations
damage to Israel’s image has already
occurred.